The Dark Will End the Dark, page 4
One morning, Owen awoke. He took a shower, shaved, and brushed his teeth. As he applied his deodorant, he noticed something was missing. His hiccups were gone. Anxiously, he hunched over his morning paper, sipping his Sanka, expecting at any moment that they would descend upon him again like birds of prey. But they didn’t. Without giving himself time to think about it, he called in sick to work. He felt like celebrating but had no one to celebrate with. He cracked a root beer and went to the calendar to calculate how long they had lasted: two years, eight months, and eleven days. His prison term was over. Deep down in his gut, somewhere near his diaphragm, he knew that he was free.
•••
In time, Owen forgot. His hiccups became an intangible thing: like a dream; like his childhood; like his marriage. It amazed him how quickly it happened. It was like stepping out of one car and getting into another. He met a woman named Connie at a bowling alley, and after six months of dating they married. They lived together in the one-bedroom house across the street from the overgrown park with the cracked sidewalks. She worked part-time at the local greenhouse. On weekends, she dug up the backyard into a serviceable garden. She got pregnant and gave birth to a girl, who they named Lisa. Using his great powers of rearranging, Owen transformed the den into a nursery and the basement into a den.
When Owen and Connie’s baby was born, Clyde and his wife came to Michigan for a visit. After dinner, the women hung drapes in the nursery as Owen and Clyde relaxed in front of the television. Lisa slept in a portable crib beside the couch. The men sipped beer, recalling their days at Best Way until something caught Clyde’s attention.
“Hey!” he yelled, nearly upsetting the bag of chips in his lap. “Shut up! That’s the guy!”
Owen used the remote to turn up the volume. A picture came on the screen, a black and white photo of a man in overalls. The reporter said it was Irving Monroe.
“He’s the Hiccup King!” Clyde hollered. The baby began crying. “Now I guess he’s dead.”
He had died of something, some ailment or condition that went unheard beneath Clyde’s yelling. Once Clyde was silent, Owen listened to the story. Mr. Monroe had come down with the hiccups on July 18th, 1950, and continued to hiccup once every 1½ seconds until he passed away. He had been immortalized in the Guinness Book of World Records. He was survived by wife Elizabeth and four children. Elizabeth described Irving as an “unflappable man” and “a wonderful husband and father who never let hiccups get in the way of success.” His record, according to the reporter, was unlikely to ever be broken.
Penis
The man squeezes into a space between refrigerator and wall. Breathing feels asthmatic. Heat climbs everything.
The moon offers a square of light. Or not, in truth, a square. Upon the linoleum it resembles distended farmland viewed from a plane.
The man is forty and wants to live old. This night she’ll kill me, he knows. A metallic scream from the attached garage scores his eardrums. She’s out there, probably, his wife—her claws in violation of codes, contracts, decency—and his Mercedes, his reward for years in medical sales.
The man visualizes a fingernailed car door and finds to his surprise that he doesn’t care. Bald radials, oil-burning engine, eroded brake pads—is he describing himself? He hasn’t driven the Mercedes in months. He hasn’t showered. His life has crumbled and his wife did the damage but he can’t prove it and now he no longer cares.
Let her. He slides from the cramped hiding spot, gathers a lungful, and faces the door. In fact, please destroy my car, he shouts. It has brought nothing but misery.
He feels committed; he has changed his life just now.
The car-scratch ceases. He hears the pulse of crickets, a thousand tiny policemen blowing whistles.
How easily she succumbs to reverse psychology. His lungs unblock. He feels springy in Kansas. This is his house, his life! Fightless surrender won’t happen. He resolves.
A gentle tap sounds at the door.
It’s just like her to change tack. Well, I can change, too.
The man pulls down his pants and shorts. He scuffles, counter-bound. The door is locked—a strong bolt—but she has a key, and in moments or seconds she’ll be through, won’t she? And then what?
She knocks a second time. Impatient. Or so it seems. He wonders how many times he has been wrong about her, starting when. Any number would be impossibly low or high. He draws the carving knife from the block and thumb-checks its sharpness.
On the third knock, his other hand gathers his bundle, precious. Blade raised. Ready. Ready for sacrifice, ready for blood.
Deadbolt clicks. Knob turns.
The man’s father steps inside, towering in a black suit. Jacket sleeves cover him to the knuckles. His face is crabmeat. His pomaded hair gives back the moonlight.
I nicked your car, says the father, just before he sees: the bare legs, the knife, the cupped hand. His fatherly eyes, grim and familiar, issue a challenge. You’re in a kitchen, for Pete’s sake.
I was expecting someone else, the man says. He glances about for a place to set the knife. In the damned kitchen both counters reside beyond arm’s length.
The moment is death and close enough. Because how can he move without toppling? And what kind of man falls nude while his father stands watching?
Head
The husband’s head stopped.
No trauma. No pain. No warning. In the middle of explaining to a woman from Duluth that her policy did not cover any act of God involving water, and therefore, regrettably, she would not receive Prime Way compensation, the husband’s words were snuffed out like a candle under a glass.
He fell into blackness. All sound sucked away.
He was aware of the physical world, but from a distance, as if he had plunged into a deep hole. He no longer conceived of either his hand or the receiver; he only sensed, wordlessly, that a distant part of himself stood in contact with something not of himself that could be used for destruction.
On the surface, he roared into violence.
Two colleagues subdued the husband when he began hitting his computer monitor with the phone. While they wrestled him to the floor, the men noticed how his head drooped like a flower with a broken stem. Saliva spilled from his mouth. They wondered if he was dying, and each privately imagined commandeering his vacated cubicle.
The coworkers resented the husband, not only because his desk stood nearest the restroom. He never took sick days. He was always on time. For more than ten years, he’d skipped the Monday doughnuts. He was supremely disciplined or supremely spineless. Either way, they hated him for making them slobs by comparison.
Paramedics rushed the husband to the hospital. Neurologists applied non-invasive tests for two hours, after which they declared his head “no longer viable.”
Bedside, they pronounced the diagnosis. The patient didn’t hear.
Engulfed in blackness, he only felt a queasy, off-pitch drone signaling that his essence was motionless, rootless, and cosmically out-of-touch.
He bucked and flailed and tore at the doctors’ shirts.
Burly staffers situated the husband under heavy straps and inserted a pillow behind his head. The nurses frowned at him. “Such a tragedy,” one said. “Still got most of his hair,” said the other. The first rubbed her finger and thumb together. She clucked her tongue at the Rolex on his bedside table. “You can’t take it with you,” the other one agreed.
•••
The hospital notified the wife, who left her yoga class to be with him. She stroked the husband’s chest and held his hand. He lay with his face toward her, his blue eyes wooden. It was unnerving, this deserted stare. His bloodless cheeks appeared deflated, or perhaps this was an effect of the milky light filtering through the curtains.
It had been weeks, the wife realized, since she’d bothered to really see him. He’d become a collection of parts and impressions: a mouth, an arm, dirty socks, Barbasol. Studying him now, he scarcely resembled the man she’d married. This thing on the bed was a sculptor’s rendition, a mannequin.
The lining of the wife’s skirt caused her knees to itch. A chill rode her body. The diagnosis made no sense. A dead head? Was this a joke?
She thought she should get a second opinion. But if the second doctor said it was just a concussion, wouldn’t she automatically believe it? It was human nature to cling to the more palatable answer. In the end, wouldn’t the palatable diagnosis turn out to be wrong? And wouldn’t the husband die? And wouldn’t she be hobbled by guilt forever? And wouldn’t their daughter feel resentful? And years later, becoming a mother herself, wouldn’t the daughter resent her own daughter for making her feel guilty about having resented her mother?
Even under normal circumstances, such questions often plagued the wife. She dreaded mistakes, although normally her fears involved buying off-brand toilet paper, or visiting the salon when she’d just read about an Alabama woman who’d contracted leprosy during a pedicure.
Her hippie parents had raised her to be skeptical of authority figures, and even though the wife wasn’t a hippie and in fact resented her parents’ knee-jerk anti-establishmentarianism and New Age spirituality, she’d always embraced the inquisitive impulse. Until now. Lately, questioning felt like a euphemism for self-doubt.
She decided not to get a second opinion.
The husband stared. His chest rose and fell.
Gazing into his lusterless eyes, she felt certain that she loved him. Yes, he had his flaws: his collection of internet porn; his unwillingness to discipline their teenage daughter; his obsession with the Vietnam War (which had claimed his father’s life); his middle-age flab; his foot fungus; his devotion to Prime Way.
Why go on? Nobody was perfect. People were more than lists, right? What was she supposed to do? Line up the good over here, the bad over there, and see which side was longer? Ridiculous.
Choking on the stench of isopropyl alcohol, the wife craved a cigarette. The urge swept through her. She pictured herself lighting one and pulling a long drag—her first in, what, two decades? She needed the distraction.
“You’re the experts,” she said to the neurologists by the window. For ten minutes they’d been studying her from behind clipboards. “But if his head is,” she struggled for the right word, “a vegetable, then why is he breathing? Why do his hands move?”
The younger doctor chuckled. “No one said vegetable. We said no longer viable.”
“But why is his body moving?”
“Ever seen a chicken without a head?” the young doctor asked. “It has all kinds of moves. In Ohio, 1993, a farmer chopped off a chicken’s head. But the chicken survived. They stuffed bits of apple into its neckhole for forty days before it died.”
“Your husband’s condition is unusual, but not unheard of,” the older doctor interjected. “There was a case in Mexico in the ‘70s. Or was it Beirut in the ‘80s?” He looked to his colleague, who pursed his lips and said nothing. “The good news is that your husband’s motor functions are completely normal. He can stand, walk, run. He could tap dance on a tennis court if he was into that sort of thing. Theoretically, of course. I mean he’s physically capable of it. Whether or not he does it, that’s another issue, and I wouldn’t get your hopes up. His lungs are drawing air, however, so he won’t die. Eating isn’t a problem, as he is still able to swallow liquids. But he can’t chew. Nor can he be trained to chew. In many ways, however, he’s still the man you married.”
The young doctor interrupted: “Think of the head as just another appendage. A glorified arm.”
The wife was about to say she didn’t marry him for conversations with his arm, but a nurse sidled up to the other side of the bed and inserted a tube between the husband’s lips. By squeezing a translucent sack, the nurse sent clay-colored paste into his throat. The husband’s throat convulsed. Now and then she repositioned his face so the tube remained intact.
The wife couldn’t stop picturing her husband doing a theoretical tap dance on a tennis court. “Don’t you mean his brain isn’t viable?” she said.
“We said head, we mean head,” the young doctor answered. “Squeeze his cheek. Go on.”
When the wife hesitated, the young doctor reached across her and administered an aggressive pinch. The husband’s skin reddened, but he gave no response.
“The entire head is without feeling,” he continued. “Not only the brain.”
“The bigger question is this,” the gray-haired doctor interrupted. “Do you want to leave the head intact?”
“He no longer needs it.” The young doctor’s tone suggested they were discussing the fate of a shabby baseball cap.
The wife returned the young doctor’s gaze without feeling. She wanted him to witness, displayed on her own face, his profound insignificance. He was aware of his good looks, which annoyed her. Early thirties, she guessed, bleached teeth, a forehead tall as a billboard. A hotshot. Always got what he wanted. Graduated med school by twenty-two. Swarthy eyebrows the color of her husband’s shoulder mole. Every click of his pen was an attitude.
The older doctor cleared his throat. “His head will become unsightly in the coming weeks,” he said, fingering his wattle in a way that made the wife sad. “It’s not necrotic yet, but blood flow has dramatically decreased. All that bobbing will stress the neck.”
The young doctor described the amputation procedure. His accent was Greek—or Turkish?—his hands fluttering like birds as he spoke. Distracted by his enthusiastic pantomime, the wife caught only random phrases: “Fourth and fifth vertebrae,” “donate to science,” “purely cosmetic,” “minimal scarring, easily hidden.”
The young doctor slid a brochure into her fist. His complicated odor filled her nose. She said she would think about it.
•••
The husband was discharged the next day.
At home, he demonstrated the ability to walk, grab, hold, and kick. He could push buttons on the remote, but he did so without purpose and pressed so forcefully that the plastic cracked. He voided his bowels wherever it happened, in part because he couldn’t see, hear, or speak. He didn’t seem to understand where, or what, he was, or even what a “what” or “where” was. He was a 224-pound pastrami sandwich.
•••
“Can he think?” the wife had asked, while signing the release form. “Will he know me or our daughter? Will it help if I sing our wedding song? Or read passages from The Greatest Generation?”
“All doubtful,” the young doctor said with a lusty smile, his pheromones filling a balloon between them, jostling her, bumping her. “You need a brain for those things. His brain is literally a pile of macaroni.” He pointed to the MRI results while sliding a hand around her waist, giving a squeeze.
“I see what you mean,” the wife said. Her face heated. The neurologist was an idiot; he used “literally” in literally the wrong way. He was an inch shorter, fifteen years younger. And she wasn’t pushing him away.
•••
Now she was home with her husband, who staggered, lurched, and bulldozed. He toppled lamps and collided with walls. She placed a bottle of beer into his hand—his favorite, St. Pauli Girl. He poured it on his lap and the rest of the world. He’d become a collection of reflexes, a machine. Before, he’d at least been a machine that could get drunk and dress itself.
His destructiveness transcended slapstick. Objects in his reach became crushed or weapons or both. Hummel figurines inherited from his mother exploded against the ceiling. Burst bananas spilled their guts over his fingers. His null stare never changed. His head was a bell clapper.
The wife retreated to a corner, transfixed. The slamming of her heart wasn’t from fear. She knew, without any evidence that she could articulate, that her husband wouldn’t hurt her. What she felt was awe. He was more energetic than she’d ever seen. He’d never been violent. All of his successes had come from a measured persistence and lapdog charm he wasn’t even aware he possessed.
She kept thinking of the doctor’s words: “In many ways, he’s still the man you married.”
She couldn’t decide if this was true. Yes, he was still distant and uncommunicative. Yes, he didn’t ask about her day or help with the dishes.
But now he had a fire inside. His passion was directionless, untamed, and on display. He wasn’t siphoning himself into that goddamn Vietnam book, hunched over a keyboard in the dark.
And now he liked to be touched. Her hand on his knee, fingertip on his back, toe on his foot—any contact—and he settled. He stilled.
The husband had never stilled. He’d worked eleven-hour days, taken meals in front of the TV, played on the computer until midnight, read in bed until she forced him to kill the lamp. While asleep, he even mumbled about the NFL draft, and revision deadlines for debris removal clauses.
•••
The wife tied the husband to the recliner with nylon rope. This was in order to cook, go to bed, take a shower, drive their 15-year-old to school, and so on.
The wife brought the daughter into the living room so she could see the husband struggling against his restraints. The wife only wanted to frighten the daughter a little. She wanted the daughter to understand that this was serious.
The daughter frowned at her fingernails and scrolled through her text messages. She hadn’t been close to her father, emotionally, since he had taught her to fly a kite. So while the sight of his limp head was upsetting (the daughter’s eyes glistened with tears…unless…was she high?) she apparently viewed the current medical trauma as an adult issue that had nothing to do with her.
“I get it, Mom. It’s serious. Life is serious. I’m bloated, and I’ve got a huge Econ test I haven’t studied for.”
“Okay. So this is more serious. Take your serious and multiply it. Here. Here’s a calculator. Multiply it.”
In the following days, the daughter’s attitude worsened. “You say it’s tragic,” she said over Quaker Oats, “but he’s alive, isn’t he?” She nodded at the husband, who was duct-taped to the kitchen chair. “I needed to be fed when I was a baby. Was I a medical emergency? God, Mom.”
